I’ve always been a fan of Brother, as their devices usually come with decent support for the Linux OS (at least initially). I have an MFC-7460DN Laser Printer / Scanner in my home office, that worked fine with Ubuntu Linux for the past few years. It’s hooked up to my DSL router’s ethernet switch and acts like a network printer for all of our devices.

Just to keep my mind flexible and to take a look at another Linux distribution for a change, I recently started using Fedora Workstation 23 on my Laptop (a company-issued Lenovo ThinkPad T440s). While the OS installation was painless and all main components like Video, Audio, Networking were detected and configured correctly out of the box, the post-installation of some tools and services required some more effort.

This time, the printing part of the MFC-7460DN took me quite some time to figure out. While Brother provides RPM packages of the drivers, they are 32-bit only, and the instructions hadn’t been updated since Fedora 12. The first thing I had to do was to download two driver RPM packages. I initially started with the newer versions of the drivers, brgenml1cupswrapper-3.1.0 and brgenml1lpr-3.1.0, but somehow did not get them to work at all. I then tried the older packages, mfc7460dnlpr-2.1.0 and cupswrapperMFC7460DN-2.0.4. These installed flawlessly, and a new printer was added to the CUPS configuration automatically.

However, it was configured as a local printer, so I first had to change the existing configuration to talk to the remote LPD port instead. While the printer configuration looked correct and no errors showed up, all print jobs simply disappeared into the bit bucket, without any visible error on the application side. Unfortunately the web-based CUPS administration tool was not much helpful, either – the button View Error Log simply returned a “Not found” error. There was no error log file in /var/log/cups, so I queried the status of the CUPS service via systemd next.

Since this is a 32-bit binary, it might help to actually install a 32-bit version of the GNU C library! I simply forgot this step, even though it’s documented in the installation instructions. A simple dnf install glibc.i686 got me over this hurdle.

Unfortunately the print jobs still did not reach the printer and disappeared in the void! Checking the CUPS error log again, I now saw this: